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Keywords:

Social Sciences, Psychology, Psychology, Experimental, ILLUSORY MEMORIES, AMNESIC PATIENTS, SEMANTIC MEMORY, RECOGNITION, RETRIEVAL, RECALL, Adult, Aged, Analysis of Variance, Case-Control Studies, Deception, Female, Humans, Korsakoff Syndrome, Male, Memory Disorders, Middle Aged, Neuropsychological Tests, Recognition, Psychology, Surveys and Questionnaires, 11 Medical and Health Sciences, 17 Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology, 3202 Clinical sciences, 3209 Neurosciences, 5202 Biological psychology

Abstract:

The present study focuses on both the clinical symptom of confabulation and experimentally induced false memories in patients suffering from Korsakoff's syndrome. Despite the vast amount of case studies of confabulating patients and studies investigating false memories in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, the nature of Korsakoff patients' confabulatory behaviour and its association with DRM false memories have been rarely examined. Hence, the first aim of the present study was to evaluate confabulatory responses in a large sample of chronic Korsakoff patients and matched controls by means of the Dalla Barba Confabulation Battery. Second, the association between (provoked) confabulation and the patients' DRM false recognition performance was investigated. Korsakoff patients mainly confabulated in response to questions about episodic memory and questions to which the answer was unknown. A positive association was obtained between confabulation and the tendency to accept unstudied distractor words as being old in the DRM paradigm. On the other hand, there was a negative association between confabulation and false recognition of critical lures. The latter could be attributed to the importance of strategic retrieval at delayed memory testing.